 Another addition of military in Hawaii, I'm your host Calvin Griffin and for those of you who hadn't seen the program before here we talked about what's happening with the military and veterans community and we're trying to provide information that's definitely going to you know it's going to be important to you. We're trying to touch on some subjects that some people don't seem to want to touch but I think it's really important that we get into certain issues. One of the issues we're going to be talking about today are the DD 214s. I think George Washington was the one that said that a country is judged by the way it treats its veterans and there's this issue about the DD 214s a lot of people believe that when you get out of the military if you have an honorable court, an honorable discharge that this is going to be the key to the future but unfortunately what it seems is that there are certain coding systems that's involved with the 214s that many veterans are not aware of that could have had a major impact on their lives and their family and today we're going to be talking with Mr. Gary Port who is out of Long Island, New York an attorney and he's very very soon a subject and what I wanted to do was bring somebody on that really knew what was going on that could explain what's happening and Mr. Port thank you for joining us on the program. Hi well happy to be here anything I can do to try to get some information out there about how the 214s work is important. A lot of our people don't get it, a lot of Jags don't get it and a lot of service members are really badly screwed over by this lack of information. I'll tell you what your background on that besides being an attorney you're a veteran yourself I understand. Well I'm a retired judge advocate I was on active duty Commission December 23rd 1986 officer judge advocate basic course 112 basic course in fact one of my classmates went on to become the judge advocate general lieutenant general d'Arpino I only ended up as a mere lieutenant colonel active reserve for 28 years I retired January 1st 2015 my last assignment I was a staff judge advocate of the 78th training division. On the military side I've been been a Jag my entire career been involved heavily with the law and because of my Jag background a lot of folks come to me in my private practice who are military or veterans and as a result of that I've learned a lot of stuff about the military that I didn't learn as a Jag which the 214 is a perfect example I went to the Jag school for 10 weeks when I was first commissioned I was a defense attorney for three years I have been as I said a staff judge advocate advisor to generals didn't know a thing about the 214 until about 15 years ago people started coming to my office to hire me to do discharge upgrades that's when I started to learn the the fact that these 214s can be very prejudicial and have a devastating impact on people's lives when they're trying to get jobs after they get out of all factor duty. Right these codes that are on there I mean this goes way back coming to Vietnam era and does it go possibly beyond that because I think. Oh yeah I mean the whole point is and it there's nothing initially nefarious about it basically it's the military is getting rid of you and they want to have a reason for why they're getting rid of you so if you try to walk back into a recruiter or go to a sister service they know why you left and they're not going to let you back in or they are going to let you go back in we need to know why we kicked you out the problem that we have and by the way if you the army regulation governing these these separation codes is not a public document when I was a jag I had access to this regulation I could go to the army the website but I'd have to go log in with my common access card and then I could get the regulation now if I try to get my hands on it I can't because this isn't supposed to be a public document but the reality is everyone knows what these codes are if you go on Google and search for the codes you'll find all this information right so what should be and what's intended to be internal to the Department of Defense has gotten out into the civilian world and has a negative impact so you can get a 214 where they kick you out with a general discharge under honorable conditions or even an honorable discharge but it has a negative code in there saying drug use or personality disorder or fraudulent enlistment or I saw stuff from the the Vietnam era bed wedding homosexuality there's a whole bunch of codes there are literally hundreds of these things and could you imagine some guy with Vietnam era veteran coming back with a 214 that says bed wedding that that's that that's that's horrible or you get a 214 that says personality disorder right well the thing I'm thinking like some Vietnam era myself so the thing is like say we've of course been hearing about the stereotypical negative impact of anyone who's served in Vietnam or during that time is that they have some kind of problems the unemployment rate among vet I mean veterans from the Vietnam era is that extremely high and is there a correlation between you know these codes and I mean they're in the civilian lives how it impacted them well you have to mind there's a lot of things that went on with the with the Vietnam era veterans and it has to do a lot of stuff with what we now call PTSD we called it in World War one shell shocked it was battle fatigue in World War two we in Vietnam there was another name and then they finally in the 80s started saying well we're going to call post-traumatic stress syndrome and it's only in like the last three or four years that the military has taken a serious look at that but that's a separate issue why did the why was there a high rate of unemployment well there's a lot of PTSD that was being undiagnosed um then you had folks who got bad paper it was a lot easier to get bad paper in Vietnam than it was uh 10 15 or 20 years later because they had more um safety mechanisms but bad paper is is still easy to get so you would get a guy who may have done nothing wrong other than was late for work um he didn't get along with his commander and they gave him a general discharge or discharge under other than honorable conditions right well now you've got this 214 general discharge or or discharge under honorable other than honorable conditions and then you're going to try to get a job with this now most employers are going to be a little wary of another than honorable discharge right but then it goes a little deeper because the bigger employers really know how to read these things so if you get um at 214 that has a real listening code of RE4 but you have an honorable discharge well honorable discharge is great but in RE4 means you are not allowed back in well if i've got an RE4 guy sitting in front of me i know something bad happened to him in the military and the military has banned him from ever coming back so i'm a little wary so even an honorable discharge with an RE4 code can make a guy radioactive right so the at least the army and i will give the army big cred for this after the the vietnam era the army came up with a separate branch within the jag core of defense attorneys so everyone who gets accused of some misconduct in the army gets to a free military attorney the other branches don't do that like the army does so it's still easier to get bad paper if you're in the navy the air force the marines uh you can still get bad paper in the army but you have a lot more safeguards because you got the trial defense service they're standing watch right so but in the vietnam era you didn't have even the trial defense service for the army and even now even now we see situations where marines sailors airmen and even into some extent the army guys are being told look if you sign this piece of paper we'll get you out within two weeks if you don't sign it you're gonna be around for a long time you could end up going to jail just sign here and go right and we get guys signing and getting other than honorable discharges when they would have never gotten it uh if they had gone through the right process to get another than honorable discharge they either have to give you a board or you've got to agree to it if you agree to it you get the other than honorable discharge if you go to a board there's a chance that you might win right well with these codes if they go how does this does this have an impact when they go for veterans benefits things of that nature oh absolutely and this is this has been a big issue let's talk about let's talk about again if if you have an other than honorable discharge let's let's go back to that one because maybe i should take a step back in because even veterans don't really understand all the discharges out there because there's many different layers here you've got the administrative discharges that's the honorable discharge the general discharge under honorable conditions and the other than honorable discharge those are the administrative ones there's one other one hanging out there called the entry level separation that's for folks who don't make it too basic then you've got the punitive discharges you've got the bad chronic discharge and you've got the dishonorable you can only get those if you go to a court marshal get convicted and the court marshal sentences sentences you to either a bad chronic discharge or a dishonorable discharge so those are the levels of discharge now on your dd 214 it states your level of discharge it states the narrative the reason for the discharge it has a separation code which is a three letter code and it's got a uh... a numerical code now you put all those pieces together and it's going to have some devastating impact the other than honorable discharge in and of itself bars you from any uh... bed veterans benefits now we have a brand new uh... secretary of the uh... b a who has said oh we're going to make sure that folks who have ptsd and tbi are not denied veterans benefits even if they get an oth right that's already in the regulation but it's not being followed because here's how that works if you have an oth you now have to go to the v a improve that your service was not dishonorable right well if you got kicked out for drug use they're going to say your service was dishonorable but if your drug use which by the way is going to be on your 214 you know it may say drug use so now you got an oth drug use and that's what your spin code is saying but you've got a purple heart and the reason that you would do in drugs is you have ptsd and traumatic brain injury they didn't treat you you end up self medicating with with uh marijuana cocaine or ecstasy now you've got an oth and a a narrative of drug use and you're going to be denied denied treatment at the v a for the ptsd and the tbi and by the way i'm not making this one up this is an actual case that i did with my uh i teach a uh a law clinic the hospital law school where we provide free legal benefits to veterans who have these problems and we had a marine first week he was in iraq he was blown up by an ied traumatic brain injury punctured eardrum he was diagnosed with tbi traumatic injury and the ptsd they send him back to duty within a week he spent the rest of his tour there at the end of his tour there's only four people left alive in his squad only four he's one of them he gets sent back to the states again diagnosed with ptsd and tbi they give him no treatment he then goes out with some senior nco's who were also suffering from ptsd right they all party he pops hot on it on a urine test and the marine corps kicks him out with an oth now they don't they tell him sign here and go and we'll get you right out so he doesn't go for a board he signs for an oth so here we've got a guy with we've got a purple heart ptsd tbi and no veterans benefits we took that to the uh navy marine board of correction military records and wonder of wonders they did give him an upgrade to an honorable discharge but rather than put down what i wanted which was expiration term of service they basically put down you know at the discretion of the board there's a special language that they put on there so his 214 says honorable he gets the benefits of the VA but someone who knows how to read a 214 is going to look at that and say oh he got this upgraded by the board something must have happened you know so even then they had to give that little bit at the at the end right yeah uh miss uh the gary want to take a short break uh but we'll come back and continue and continue the conversation but you're here on military no military in hawaii and um yeah stay tuned we'll be right back hawaii lucas host of hawaii is my mainland every friday at three p.m on think tech hawaii we talk about things of interest to those of us who live here and my past blogs can be found at kawaii lucas dot com okay and we're back and again my name is calvin and this is mr gary port who's calling her from long island new york and again our subject today is uh secret codes on dd 214's um and i apologize first may i call you gary yes go ahead okay great well gary let's say this with this i know that uh i came across the information by totally by accident and uh but i found out that there's a lot of individuals who have uh either took at the court or trying to you know get it out there to the public but the mainstream press is not picking up on it and on top of that with some of the organization the veterans organizations i talked to i was a little bit surprised at the lack of interest that they showed you know and do you see that or is there is some i'm still trying to figure it out am i missing something there's three parts with there's the press there's the uh the politicians and then there's the vs os and the problem is rather than you know some sort of dark conspiracy i think it's because people just don't understand it there's so many people who have not been in the military that when they hear these kind of things they get a deer in the headlights look and as a result it's just easier to ignore the whole thing but i think to me it seemed like okay if the veterans are being shortchanged because they're being bounced out or you know discharge and they're not getting any benefits then this comes back to have an impact on the local communities because if they're not getting help in any other way then isn't this sort of a drain on some of the resources that's out in the surveillance side well of course it does but it's so much easier to ignore the problem because look there's a financial stake in this from the federal government when you give these people benefits it costs the feds money right if you now retroactively wave the magic wand and give these people benefits it's because it isn't just the the a benefits it may also be the the gi bill if you get a general discharge you lose your gi bill benefits there's a lot of money writing on that and in fact um to give you an example when they uh they waved the magic wand and said it's okay for homosexuals to serve in the military they did not retroactively fix all the discharges for the couple of generations of folks still alive who got kicked out for being homosexual right and why because if they if they then said we're going to make it retroactive all these folks would then be stepping on the thing i want my benefits it's cost too much money so we're not going to do it right so it's all about money basically it's a it's a money issue i mean my personal opinion it's a money issue i think it's just a lot easier to screw over a veteran and save money because while we do have the vso's uh out there doing a good job and um you know folks like a usa moa american legion uh veterans of foreign words and all these other great service organizations um they're not as loud as some of the other organizations out there and so because we're not as loud it's a lot easier to ignore us politicians will love to march with us on on memorial day and veteran's day oh they're always out there with us on those days you ever notice that guys they're they're taking pictures with with us and they're patting us on the back and they think it's all great but when the time comes whether they're republican or democrat you know to vote for things that we need they're not there many moray wall yeah i see yeah just like they want the face time in the camera time now one of those things but one of the things like with the codes if there's somebody that uh that's fast forward looks like to today anyhow how much of the how much of these coatings is being used as definitely having a non-negative impact on the current veterans from afghanistan and iraq is there any way that they if they do have these and is there any way that they can correct it to find out you know you know to get it off the record or other well first up you're asking is has anyone done any sort of study on this and the answer is no you and i are just sort of spitballing on this baseball we've heard anecdotally yeah i am all i'm i'm part of um a listserv with a bunch of other law professors who won clink throughout the country great folks at william mary set this up and what i find fascinating is how much information is not out there very bright the law professors and practitioners like myself are asking questions which are very basic and none of us know the answer on because no one's got the information out there and this is a great question what impact do these codes have on people's ability to get um uh get employed i just saw recently a really just on the oths which uh was just published in a law journal and all of us on the listserver like wow you know uh uh professor caren marcy caren from uh the uh she's professor law and the jacket level uh olander director for legislative clinic at the university of district of columbia she just put out a great piece in the case western law review talking about other than honorable discrimination and this is the first piece that i have ever seen and she's trying to pull together all these numbers talking about how just the oths have created a massive problem with with employment discrimination and this is like the first piece i've ever seen this it's a great piece so no one is doing the work out there so it wouldn't work there's no studies there's no governmental studies we're pulling information from public sources trying to get this information and trying to understand what's going on with all these veterans issues it's it's you know there are so many other problems out there that seems to have all wonderful studies on but this this issue on what these discharges do and had their impact is upon our veterans seems to be ignored because no one either cares about it yeah or they're just so flummoxed by the whole concept that they're afraid to look into it yeah uh what well with the course with this issue this goes the whole gamut uh excuse me a list of personnel officers um discovers everybody as far as anybody who served in the military right hasn't could have an impact well well i'll tell you something my my son who's uh serving korea right now tell me a couple of lieutenants missed curfew okay and uh because one was drunk and the other one was trying to you know didn't want to leave him alone to miss curfew they kicked both these two kids all right the second lieutenant so they're probably all of 23 or 24 years old right they just got the boot because of missing curfew and you're right it's gonna officers too so they're gonna get a 214 that's going to have some really negative stuff on it about and what it what was it that happened a 23 year old kid who's in korea missed curfew because he went out drinking and the other buddy stayed with him so that uh he wouldn't be left alone yeah and now you get a bad 214 over that yeah i don't know i i talked to a lot of uh veterans over here in active duty people and it seemed like with the different uh syndromes that they come up with uh i think earlier you mentioned about the immature personality development uh all kind of things you know like say it seems no matter where you go it's like a minefield where if you just look the wrong way there goes your career you know and there goes your benefits and it could be you you just meet up with the wrong person um you know it's very easy if the wrong people are in your chain of command because at the end of the day there is no standard yeah there's regulations but there's no standard i'll give you an example i had a situation where when i was in sja we had a senior nco go off on a on a lieutenant colonel now when it came to my desk as the jag i could have just said fine you know what we're going to process the uh the nco for for elimination because he was disrespectful to a senior officer but something didn't sit right with me so i sent him mental hygiene and turned out that he had PTSD so we sent him off for for mental treatment because i had a good general who listened to me and i didn't feel it was right just to automatically screw off for senior nco but you don't get that all the time right so you get a situation where you have people who don't want to deal with the personnel issues i've got too much to deal with i've got the mission to deal with i've got to deal with my personnel issues i got to make sure that everyone's mo sq i got to make sure all the stuff's happening and you sarge you're part of my problem right now i don't have time to deal with you i don't care that you have a problem with your wife i don't care that you're a combat veteran i'm making you go away because you're an interference to my mission yeah no i think it's a major ripple effect goes right so we see the reflection in what in suicides not only with the active duty exactly also exactly that's another and i went to so many briefings back in the uh during the war you know where i would as the jag i would go to all these briefings and they would talk about we've just went off the pentagon and we had all this stuff and in fact when you have a suicide i was involved in two suicide investigations that gets briefed to the vice chief of the of the of the um i'm forgetting the title now but um i was in the reserves and i i'm my boss had to brief oakard the office of the commander of the army reserves who then had to brief above so i'm communicating with the sja of the car to make sure that when they brief up at the pentagon because everyone gets all torqued up on the suicide but you're right it starts down at that that company level okay so you're telling the company commander you've got to make sure that you're doing soldier care but we also have to make sure that you do in the mission and make sure that everyone is qualified and you're able to uh go off to the sandbox so you got this poor captain who's now stressed between going off here and taking care of snuffy who's not up to speed well i'm gonna get rid of snuffy because he's keeping me back on my mission then snuffy commits suicide because no one took care of him all right yeah something you mentioned earlier about you know like over medication because some of the things with they're not being treated seems like they're being pushed out there you know multiple tours and everything else and it's like it gets 22 if you go for help whatever it is then they find a way of saying okay well you're not mission ready so therefore we're gonna get rid of you if you've been in the position in the military where you've been in for example 10 13 years whatever and you have the opposite i mean you have the you're facing the possibility of being discharged whatever reason and or either if you have a family and you got to need to take care of them you know you're just going to go ahead like saying take the medication and the hope for the best you know and well you're right you suck it up and you move on yeah i said over here i'd like to personally i'd like to talk to a number of troops and a lot of them are one guy in particular i'll be real brief about what this he had mentioned like he's been there got the went through everything else and it came back and he was having so many problems with his wife family everything else and he told me like one we talked it was like i'm i volunteered to go back over but i know i'm not coming back and i said well we got a permission whatever and it was like no he says well i came back you know i went through all these issues and i'm not getting the help i need you know so if i go back at least i can choose the time i do my demise where when it when my time comes at least my family's going to get insurance they're going to be taken care of i'll be viewed as you know doing a service my country something like that you know never seen the gentleman again anyhow but that's just one you know one of the stories that i'm personally familiar with you know where the lack of support you know when you have people out there that they feel that they have nobody that's looking out for them you know and they feel like you're backed into a corner what are you going to do you know and like and exactly and there is no real i mean sure the military gives a lot of lip service to this but at the end of the day you put too much pressure on the command to say you've got to get the mission done so the commander now has the choice of taking care of the mission or taking care of the service member well he's looking at his officer evaluation report he's looking at what his lieutenant colonel is telling him or his colonel is telling him he's going to take the mission first it's the tone is set by the senior officers down to the junior officers and the senior officers are saying mission mission mission then the junior officers saying mission mission mission yeah they're losing the point gary we're getting out to the wire anyhow like i said this there's so much more that we can talk about this and i hope we can do a follow-up program because i really believe and i i i know you're sincere about uh make sure this issue was addressed but uh i think we got about two minutes left but is anything that any high points that you want to touch on before we end the interview well there's just so much on it and i think the thing that we really need to do is one we as veterans really need to make sure that we hold the feet to the fire to the politicians and oh look i'm a democrat but that doesn't mean anything when it comes to the veterans issues democrats and republicans equally will cross the aisle and in a bipartisan method screw the veterans every time okay it is not a democrat or republic issue it is a veteran issue and we have got to hold politicians regardless of their political stripe up to that high standard that they they want us to believe that they hold this nonsense of them always showing up the american legion will always showing up the parade for the friggin photographs and then turning around and screwing us has got to stop we've got to hold them accountable and for every you know and we have very few veterans who are serving in congress and even the ones that are there you got it are they doing it for the right reasons or not for every kami duckworth who is you know who lost both legs and it's probably one of the best people out there for us there's a couple of other guys out there who are running and veterans who are running for the wrong reasons so merely being a veteran is not going to give them a pass at a politician a politician is a politician and we've got to hold them accountable for what happens to our people because at the end of the day the reality is only only veterans are going to watch out for veterans there you go okay gary elixir we got to go anyhow but i appreciate the time like saying we'll talk online anyhow but i really like to do a follow-up you've been a wealth of information and i'm pretty sure it has been very instructive to a lot of veterans out there but um again thank you keep up the good work and i as a veteran you know thank you for your service and also what you're doing hey i'm not a hero i just represent heroes okay well thanks a lot okay we'll talk anyhow but really appreciate the you taking the time to join us today okay thank you okay already bye okay about to really wrap it up anyhow but while we're talking about feedback contact us here contact me and we'll take it from there but we will do a follow-up on this and i want to thank all you for tuning in joining and we'll take it from there